KNX approach for intelligent buildings

AN OPEN APPROACH TO EIB/KNX SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

EIB/KNX is a field bus used in home and building automation. When building
application programs for EIB/KNX nodes, one was hitherto faced with low-level
constructs. To improve this situation, a RAD (Rapid Application Development) like
approach was adopted. This model encapsulates the system software entities in a way
which is inspired by the object-oriented paradigm. It also makes use of functional blocks
to describe the application behavior. To allow the roles of software developer and project
engineer to be separated, the tool chain is designed for interfacing with an integration tool.
The article discusses the work ow when building an EIB/KNX system and the resulting
requirements on the tool chain. The GCC-based solution which was developed is presented.
Specific challenges in porting the GNU tool chain to the standard micro-controller
for EIB/KNX nodes are sketched. The implementation also includes an open PC-based
EIB/KNX network access and management server.

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